Barber of the Vongola
by fringeperson
Summary: Inspired by (and with permission from) Starchains' fics Xanxus' Babysitter and The Varia's Hairdresser. Both of which are wonderful fics. Go read them. I wanted this to be epic, but the muses weren't co-operating. Don't Own, Oneshot, Complete. Xanxus swears and Harry talks in maddening riddles. And some hair gets cut.


Xanxus settled himself into the chair, a simple task, but one that came more easily now than it had the first time he'd sat in the chair. He could still remember the day that his grandmother ( _no, not his grandmother, because the Old Man wasn't his father_ ) had brought him here for the first time. He'd climbed up the foot rest, onto the seat, and wiggled his little behind into the crease between the seat and the back. He'd put one hand on each arm-rest, and looked around himself like he'd sat down on a ride at an amusement park, rather than in a barber's chair.

Xanxus could remember being shocked at his grandmother's claim that the young man who was to cut his hair had also cut her father's hair, her hair, and the Old Man's hair. He might have only been learning basic mathematics at the time, but he knew about 'older' and 'younger' just fine. The barber, Harry Potter, was _younger_ than the Old Man. Definitely younger. The Old Man had wrinkles and grey hair. Signore Potter barely had the faintest of lines around his eyes and forehead, which were always the first places to get wrinkles, and he was definitely not grey.

It didn't add up to Xanxus, but Daniella Vongola had just laughed it off and not answered him when he pointed it out.

Signore Potter had been the one to explain it to Xanxus, quietly, when he was brought a second time by a member of Housekeeping.

"They don't see what you do," he'd said. "They don't notice what you do. You can tell them a hundred times, tell them a thousand, but the truth about me can simply not be held by them. The truth is like a bubble that way."

Signore Potter was always saying things like that. Wise words that were full of imagery and not easily understood, for all that they seemed straightforward at first. Signore Potter's wisdom, Xanxus had learned, generally had more layers than an onion and was twistier than a corkscrew if you took the time to try and think it out all the way.

For now, Xanxus wasn't interested in giving himself a headache, or inducing heartache, by thinking about the things that his barber had said. Truth is like a bubble, indeed. No, he was more interested in simply relishing the feeling of deft fingers in his hair. The feathers he wore were removed carefully, and the chair was tilted back so that he was almost lying in it, rather than sitting. Warm water abruptly joined those deft fingers in massaging his scalp.

An appreciative moan rumbled deep in his chest and out past his lips.

"What troubles you, child of my heart?" Harry asked as he worked. Apart from the two of them, the place was empty, and the sign on the door had been turned to 'closed' shortly after Xanxus walked in, so there was no danger in speaking freely.

They would not be overheard.

"Not a child," Xanxus rumbled. "Definitely not _your_ child. Not the Old Man's either."

"Ah," Harry said, a wealth of understanding in that single syllable. "Powerful old men are very good at having good intentions. On the other hand, they tend to be not so good at the follow through."

"What do you know about it?" Xanxus demanded, though he kept his eyes shut and otherwise just enjoyed the professional ministrations upon his scalp.

"Oh, _quite_ enough, I assure you," Harry promised in answer. "Luckily for me, that was a long time ago, and I am now too old, and much too uninteresting, to be caught much in the machinations of old men."

"Uninteresting bullshit," Xanxus whipped out smartly. "You're twenty-something, but you've been cutting hair for the Vongola since the time of Primo!"

"Mm," Harry hummed in placid agreement, "and in all those generations, you're the first to realise such details about me."

"You've made my every visit a pain in the neck because of it too," Xanxus grumbled.

"And yet you don't go to a different barber," Harry quipped with a light, teasing air as he finished washing the young man's hair before he straightened the back of the chair again.

"They're all trash," Xanxus countered, scoffing. "I wouldn't trust any of them with something as sharp as a window wiper near my ear."

Harry laughed at that.

"Those window wipers certainly are dangerous," he said happily. "Now, am I doing anything different with your hair this time, or are you keeping the sides shaved and the rest in a mess of defiant, cresting spikes?"

"The fuck do you think?" Xanxus grumbled.

"I think that if you grew it out, I mean properly grew it out, you'd frighten a few of the Vongola's historians into thinking that Ricardo had come back to life," Harry replied easily. "You look more and more like the man every time you come to visit me."

"Well I'm not fucking him," Xanxus denied.

"I'd hope not. He's been dead for some time, and I didn't take you for a necrophiliac."

"Shut up, Trash!" Xanxus snapped, an indignant blush rising in his cheeks. "That's not what I fucking meant and you fucking know it!"

Harry laughed, free and easy, and picked up the electric razor that he would be using to shave the sides of the young man's head.

"Old men like to play games," Harry said as he worked. "Some like games of chance, others like games of strategy, but you can very well rely on the sort of games a man likes to play to tell you something about how they live their life."

"Yeah?"

"Mm. You have heard the saying 'those who live by the sword, die by the sword', haven't you?" Harry checked.

"It's come up once or twice," Xanxus acknowledged. "Especially since I've got a fucking sword-obsessed shark for my Rain."

"Well, you think about that. Civilians, people who think that fighting is terrible, would think that such a saying is a warning. For people like you, and your swordsman, it is a promise. You will not die old and infirm in your beds. You will die the way that you lived – passionately, fighting, laughing in the face of death even as you grasp the Reaper's hand and are dragged on to the next great adventure," Harry said. "Signore Timoteo, his weapon has always been a walking stick, even when he was young. Now, what does that say about him?"

"That he has always been a weak, limping fool," Xanxus suggested with a scowl.

"That is one way of looking at it, yes," Harry agreed, "but why would a man who does not need a cane, use one?"

For a while, the shop was silent, except for the soft sounds made as Harry shaved and clipped and combed and blow-dried.

"Appearances," Xanxus said at last, when Harry was putting the feathers back into his hair.

"Indeed," Harry confirmed, "and what sort of man uses appearances as a weapon?"

"A manipulative one," Xanxus growled. "After all, looks can be deceiving."

Harry nodded, a sad smile on his face.

"You be careful of Signore Timoteo, child of my heart," Harry cautioned. "Old men, they play games with the lives of other men because they are assured of their own strength, because it is more _fun_ to watch young people fight, and bleed, and kill, and die. If they stepped in, they would simply resolve the issue, as they have done before. Or such is their view. Puppet masters pull strings for the sake of entertainment, not because of need."

"So cut the fucking strings," Xanxus said, "or kill the fucking puppeteer."

"Easier said than done," Harry answered as he set the blow drier down. "Old masters tend to set things up so that there will be at least one unbreakable string between you and them, so that even when they are a corpse being eaten by worms, they can still pull at you."

~The End~


End file.
